A journey to literacy

A journey to literacy

            For a long period literacy has been perceived as the ability to read and write. Despite the fact that these are the basics of literacy, in the 21^st century, literacy is understood from a wider perspective as the confidence, ability and willingness to interact with language and educational information to acquire, create as well as communicate various meanings and messages in our daily lives. From personal experience, it’s hard to determine where to start from whether it is reading, speaking or writing areas in which I have greatly advanced over the years to date.  Despite this success, it is important to note that I didn’t manage all these by my own but rather teachers, friends, parents as well as peers played a big role in ensuring that I successfully secure my current position in terms of my literacy.

The image is quite blurry but I can recall various shows of little kids’ during my younger years. I recall these shows as blue’s ideas. They used the simple but useful words, idioms among others used in daily communications and similarly on TV screens during programs such as Rugrats and SpongeBob Square Pants. Since the programs used simple words, it was quite easy for kids like me to understand the program at a younger age. These shows and programs did set a firm foundation for me to pick up phrases and words.

I recall the kindergarten days quite vividly. A redshirt and khaki pants were the standard dress code of the school at St. Jacob of Antioch. My teacher whose name I couldn’t familiarize with at such a young age was nice, patient and despite the fact that she was surrounded by noisy as well as attention-seeking kids, she did pull through each day. It was at this place that I first saw the alphabet letters, numbers and simple drawings with their respective names. Visual training technique was the predominant training technique back then and still is in most kindergarten schools. This proved to be the most effective and efficient way of teaching kids new vocabularies.

There is a reason as to why my first grade has remained so clear in my mind to date. Mrs. Brown, the first-grade teacher in the school I attended taught us on various letters but specifically letters ‘D’ and ‘B’. For a kid of my age, they seemed to be like an image on a vertical plane. Furthermore, she insisted on the need for us to come up with words beginning with the letters ‘D’ and ‘B’. I can gladly say that for the first time in my entire life I did brainstorm although I wasn’t aware of it back then. It is through this prewriting that I managed the progressive years as I developed to write in cursive. Progressively, in second grade I managed to write my name’s signature.

Some of the toughest years in my journey of literacy basically in writing, were my middle school years. This is due to the fact that during this period we employed a number of writing techniques within a bunch of techniques a good example is a class on politics. Some of the techniques included Haikus as well as free writing. Several assignments demanding neat cursive handwriting were issued after which I continued to write to at least advance my skills and it did turn out to be interesting as it gave one’s work the look of professionalism. Similarly, writing notes to people and friends simplified the work of the reader. The experiences in middle school acted as an aiding tool in the comprehension of sentence formatting and phrasing as well as grammatical rules.

Not long after joining the university, we were required to prepare and compose a research paper in the English class. I composed and wrote my paper about the eligibility requirement in athletics. Since the topic was quite challenging in finding solutions to, I found it very helpful in my growth as a writer as well. In addition, I kept journal entries which I could update on a daily basis for almost a year and a half. This trained me with the skill of organization in writing as well as expressing myself in a chronological manner. In order to ensure that words did flow together, I was forced to employ a transitional writing format.

In conclusion, narrative writing has been part of what I have also covered in my journey of literacy. It is a form of expression that seems to entail a story as well as dialogue. Writing a narrative has proven to be a very effective tool that can be employed in testing a writer’s imagination as well as their creativity. Despite the experience I have gained to this point in my education, my hypothesis still stands that there is no expert in literacy and it is just as difficult as any task that is yet to be undertaken.